Creative professional CRMs. Both charge monthly forever.
$39/mo
Photographers and creatives wanting simple, beautiful interface
$40/mo
Creatives wanting deep customization and automation
$279 once
Service professionals wanting operations without monthly rent
HoneyBook ($39/mo) and Dubsado ($40/mo) are both established tools with real user bases, and for most people the honest answer is that either will do the job — the difference shows up in fit, not quality. Over three years the running totals are roughly $1,572 for HoneyBook and $1,613 for Dubsado, because subscription pricing compounds. Read the section below on which one suits your work; the cost table further down shows where the bill actually differs.
| Feature | HoneyBook | Dubsado | Nexa |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $16–$66/mo (typically $39) | $20–$40/mo (typically $40) | $279 once |
| Target | Photographers, event planners, creatives | Same, with more customization | Any service professional |
| Contracts | Built-in | Built-in with signatures | Via Notes/Jobs (use DocuSign if needed) |
If you are choosing between these two, this is the part that matters. Both are established products and neither is a mistake — the question is which fits how you actually work. We have left ourselves out of this section entirely.
Headline prices rarely survive contact with a real invoice. These are the parts of the bill that move: where the ladder starts and ends, what an extra seat adds, and what comes off the top of money you take through the tool. A dash means we do not have that figure recorded — not that the fee is zero.
| HoneyBook | Dubsado | |
|---|---|---|
| How it is priced | Monthly subscription | Monthly subscription |
| Entry price | $16/mo | $20/mo |
| Top published tier | $66/mo | $40/mo |
| Plan people typically land on | $39/mo | $40/mo |
| Per extra user | $0 (team members included at Premium) | $0 (unlimited users on Premier) |
| Payment processing | 2.9%+$0.25 (3.5%+$0.25 Amex) | none (use your own processor) |
| Free tier | No | Yes, but reduced over time |
| Three-year total | $1,404 | $1,440 |
| Five-year total, with increases | $3,000 | $3,080 |
Both of these are real products that a lot of businesses run on happily. If a comparison page only tells you what is wrong with the tools it is comparing, it is selling you something. Here is the honest case for each.
HoneyBook is the more affordable of the two at $39/mo, though you may meet its limits as you grow. Dubsado costs more at $40/mo but brings a broader feature set. Recurring pricing compounds, so the multi-year figure is the one that decides it.
There is a third shape to consider, and we should say plainly that it is ours: Nexa is a one-time purchase at $279 covering scheduling, invoicing, CRM, time tracking and job management. It suits people who want to stop paying monthly and can do without staffed support and a large integration ecosystem. If those matter to you, one of the two tools above is the better answer, and we would rather you bought the right thing.
5 years of HoneyBook: $960-3,960. 5 years of Dubsado: $1,200-2,400. Nexa forever: $279.
For reference, since we are one of the three options named on this page: Nexa is $279 once, with no monthly fee and no per-seat charge. Whether that beats a subscription depends entirely on how long you would keep paying one.
This section is deliberately one-sided: it collects what operators complain about, which is only useful once you have read what each tool does well above. These are opinions from our own research notes — 88 assessments across 7 business categories — not audited findings or review-site ratings. We show the trade beside each one because most of these are conditional: a complaint about progress billing is decisive for an iron worker and irrelevant to a hair stylist. Where a complaint cites a price, it is the price that operator was quoted at the time.
Wrong unit of work — built for events, not multi-week wellness protocols.
Built for events. Weekly coaching with high reschedule rate doesn't fit.
$708/year for templates and payment processing. You're paying retail for what's basically a Stripe wrapper.
Built for photographers, not airbrush artists juggling event gigs, custom commissions, and party bookings.
$39/month for managing cosplay commissions. Most makers are part-time and seasonal around convention dates.
$39/month for managing 8-10 clients. The proposal workflow is overkill — you just need scheduling and invoicing.
$39/month and can't handle on-call scheduling, package billing with payment plans, or birth attendance tracking.
$39/month and built for photographers. Henna artists need event booking, not proposal workflows.
Built for events. Weekly chess coaching doesn't fit.
Powerful but took weeks to set up. The learning curve is brutal for someone who just wants to book faces.
Too complex for what DJs need. I need contracts, deposits, and a timeline — not a 15-step automation workflow.
$40/month with a steep learning curve. Setup takes weeks and the forms are overkill for solo designers.
$40/month with a setup curve so steep you gave up halfway through.
Setup took forever. The workflows are powerful but any change requires 30 minutes of configuration.
$40/month with setup so complex you never finished configuring it for travel workflows.
Took me 40 hours to set up properly. Workflows are powerful but the UI is confusing. Every update breaks something.
Assessments are recorded per trade, so the same tool reads differently depending on the work — a complaint about progress billing matters to an iron worker and not to a hair stylist. 15 trades are represented above; we add more as we record them.
Comparing "$X per month forever" against "$279 once" is not a fair fight unless we say what the monthly fee is buying. It buys real things:
Where we think the trade goes the other way: those benefits are priced as rent, they compound every year you keep paying, and you stop having them the month you stop. Which side of that is worth more depends on your business, not on our opinion — run the numbers below on your own tool list rather than taking ours.
30-day money-back guarantee. Replaces both subscriptions.
Pricing verified March 2026.